2 Books about The Wire

Years ago, when I was much younger, I used to devour interviews with writers, directors, musicians and actors in an effort to find the answers to all the questions I was asking myself about life. The reasoning was simple (to me, at least): all these people were well-known. They’d succeeded. Surely they must know what was going on.

Well, they didn’t. And in the end I learned to enjoy the interviews for what they were: mostly harmless pieces of fluff linked to publicity for a new film/book/album. Every so often one of them would throw up a little gem of information, but for the most part there wasn’t an ‘answer’ in sight.

I mention this because reading one of these titles reminded me of nothing so much as a book-length version of one of the afore-mentioned pieces of publicity fluff. All the Pieces Matter contains interviews with just about everyone involved in the making of The Wire. And when I finished, I remembered next-to-nothing of what I’d just read.

This might have been due to having read The Wire: Truth Be Told first. That book contains a synopsis of every single episode of the series, a glossary of Baltimore slang, descriptions of the major characters, David Simon’s pitch to HBO… in short, it’s crammed with information about how the series came to be made, where it was made, who made it and why the writers came up with the storylines they did. It’s truly informative, and once I’d read it, I really didn’t need to find out what Dominic West thought about playing McNulty, or Andre Royo’s views on Bubbles, or how different actors reacted to the news that their character was to be killed off.

All the Pieces Matter is (mostly) decorative fluff. Truth Be Told has information.